Improving Fascia Function For Optimal Health

Fascia is a kind of “sensing organ” (connective tissue) that extends from the top of your head to the tip of your toes. How can we work with it, improve its suppleness, and benefit from its healing capabilities? Today, Elisha Celeste of the School for Living Science and the Human Freedom Project podcast, helps us wrap our minds around this mysterious, all-encompassing tissue.

Elisha goes over the kinetic energies in nature and how they relate to how our bodies function, and consequently how our fascia acts and reacts to our environment. She offers tips for optimizing fascial health (like the importance of hydration for the fascia to work properly) while also reminding us that there is not one simple technique for healing that works for everybody. Elisha also busts common misconceptions around fascia and even fascial release.

Visit Elisha’s website for more information: elishaceleste.com

Register for the Wise Traditions conference in Orlando at wisetraditions.org

Check out our sponsors Optimal Carnivore and Paleo Valley

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Listen to the podcast here

Episode Transcript

Within the below transcript the bolded text is Hilda Labrada Gore and the regular text is Elisha Celeste.

Introduction

When you hear about fascia, what comes to mind? A lot of us think of the common ailment of plantar fasciitis, but there is so much more to this connective tissue. It would behoove us to do a deeper dive. This is episode 493, and our guest is Elisha Celeste. She is the founder of the School for Living Science and the Kinetics Academy. She is the host of the Human Freedom Project Podcast.

In this episode, Elisha helps us understand the connective tissue that is fascia. She goes over what it is, how to keep it supple and springy, and why it matters. She explains common misconceptions related to fascia. She points to how compression and shearing of fascia, for example, helps create structured water in the body, which is so healing. Mostly, Alicia reminds us that we need to explore who we are and what we need as citizen scientists.

Before we get into the conversation, I want to invite you to the Wise Traditions Conference in Orlando, Florida this October 25th to 27th, 2024. We’re excited to announce that Sophia Nguyen-Eng will be one of the speakers at the conference. She is known as @SprinkleWithSoil on Instagram. Sophia is also the author of The Nourishing Asian Kitchen Cookbook.

Come out to the conference and hear Sophia speak on the topic of Nourishing Asian Cuisine Reimagined – A Journey To Reclaim Authentic Flavors, Free From MSG And Excitotoxins. Go to the Wise Traditions website to find out more about Sophia’s talk and our whole lineup of speakers and opportunities. Save your spot and we look forward to seeing you there.

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Visit Elisha’s Elisha Celeste’s website.

Register for the Wise Traditions conference in Orlando

Check out our sponsors Optimal Carnivore and Paleovalley

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Elisha, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much. I’m so excited to be here.

Fascia is having a moment right now. I feel like it’s trending. People are talking about this connective tissue. Years ago, there wasn’t a word about it. Why do you suppose that is?

A few people were talking about it. The most famous is Ida Rolf. Most people have heard of Rolfing or structural integration. She was one of the first people to make it somewhat famous, but it was not super popular. Now, we have social media and we have the internet and YouTube. I think fascia is getting out there but if I had to guess, what’s happening right now in the zeitgeist of the internet and the wellness space is we’re having a moment in quantum biology and fascia has a relationship to that.

People are super interested in structured water, water and memory, and how those things might interact with the body. Fascia plays a role in that, at least, if you have a certain education around fascia or you’ve dug into certain rabbit holes. That would be my guess. It has gone through a few phases. I was first introduced to the world of fascia in 2008.

Back then, I would’ve told you that no one had heard of it because I would ask most of my clients when they would come to see me, “Have you heard of fascia? That’s what we’re going to be working with.” Almost everybody said no. I have to educate them, “This is what it is.” Now, everybody is like, “It’s that stuff that wraps your muscles.” Everybody has heard of it by now. It’s interesting because people have heard of different parts of fascia and so they might tell me various things.

Fascia Basics

Let’s back up a little bit. We will get to the structured water piece later. I want to start with the basics right now. Tell us what fascia is and its role in the body as you understand it.

This is my understanding. Maybe as a quick caveat, I’m on YouTube and I teach courses on this stuff. The way that I like to learn is directly from the source. I’d prefer to learn about fascia from the body and from the fascia itself than from a book or cadaver dissection class or anything like that. Even though you might say maybe that’s from the source, a cadaver is a dead body and fascia is mostly fluid. We know this from cutting open living bodies.

We’re not going to learn some of the most important things about fascia if we study cadavers. I’ve been stepping on people to do a form of fascia release that I developed into a whole methodology since 2008. That’s working directly into the fascia. I’ve had a front-row seat to all kinds of textures, from brittle, crunchy, dehydrated, and knotted up to supple, soft, and fluid over the years. I like learning directly from fascia. I’m going to share from that perspective rather than the other. I’ll interweave them a little bit because what we learn from that science can corroborate what we learn from fascia directly.

Fascia is the most abundant tissue we have in the body. This is the spiel I would give every client. It wraps every nerve ending and then every muscle fibril. Every fiber of muscle is multiple fibrils and it wraps the muscle bundle and the muscle group. It wraps our bones and our organs. It’s meant to be flexible, elastic, fluid, and able to move with us through life.

It performs a variety of functions, but my favorite is that it’s the connector and separator of the body and the communication highway. No communication happens in the body that doesn’t pass through the fascia. For example, if your liver wants to talk to your brain, it has to do that through the fascia. If one muscle wants to talk to another, it has to do that through the fascia. Fascia is the communication highway. It intercepts messages coming to us from the environment as well, such as temperature or maybe even chemicals or toxins coming into the body that enter through the skin.

We have the lymph system housed under our skin, which is encased in a sheath of fascia. Under that is the deep fascia. Fascia is getting all of these messages and messengers all the time from chemicals and water molecules to light magnetism, sound, and vibrations. It’s passing all that information through the body 24/7. It’s the best place to look, in my opinion, for gathering data about a particular body. If someone is in pain or someone has some health issue going on, fascia is the best place to look to intercept those messages. That’s how I like to think about it.

If someone’s in pain or has some kind of health issue going on, fascia is the best place to look to intercept those messages.

You said it has a role as a communicator and that’s helpful. It’s interpreting what’s coming in and even what’s going on inside the body. What was the other role you mentioned? I missed that.

I wouldn’t say that it’s interpreting anything. It’s just passing information. I would say that fascia is the most objective element in our body. Whereas the nervous system, for example, is highly subjective. If the nervous system intercepts a message coming through the fascia and sends that to our brain and we process it, that’s going to be a very subjective interpretation because we might interpret it through our own meanings, stories, and beliefs rather than what’s objectively true.

That’s one of the things that makes the body and the human being so interesting because we’re all going to interpret these things differently. The other role I said is it’s a connector and a separator. That was the other element. There is no other element in the body that touches any other element. Only fascia touches every element because it wraps everything and then it separates it. I find that fascinating. There are no two elements in the body that touch each other. They can only communicate with each other through fascia.

That is fascinating. I think you’re right. The general public is waking up to fascia in our lives, mostly because people are in pain. When they think of fascia, the most frequently used phrase I’ve heard related to fascia is plantar fasciitis. Talk to us a little bit about what tightens up the fascia and what makes it painful in different parts of the body.

I’ve spent my life trying to answer this question. I don’t have a short answer for you because pain is complex, but it’s the most fascinating topic to me. Fascia is the most fascinating element in the body, but pain is the most mysterious and interesting phenomenon that occurs in human beings. I was talking to someone the other day because I teach what I do to practitioners who would like to work with people in pain through this method of fascia release that I teach.

One of the misconceptions about fascia release, for example, and I’ll tie this back to plantar fasciitis because I have a YouTube channel and I talk a lot about various pains that we might experience that we can use fascia release to address. Plantar fasciitis is one of them. I put out a video in 2015 thinking nobody would ever see it. It was the very first video I ever put on YouTube and it went viral. It has 800,000 views by now, but it’s about plantar fasciitis.

Also, I’ve worked with a lot of people with plantar fasciitis, but the pain is very interesting. I was saying to my friend that, in many ways, it would be easier to work with people who have cancer because it’s measurable. We can image it. We can do an MRI, an X-ray, an ultrasound, or some other tests and find tumors in the body. If you think about it, you can’t locate pain. You can’t find it. It’s unimage-able and it’s highly subjective. We can circle back around to that if you want and go into the pain domain or pain science.

I find it fascinating, but as far as fascia is concerned, we need to be flexible, elastic, and fluid. The reason plantar fasciitis is so common these days is that we are getting bombarded in a whole bunch of ways that dehydrate our fascia. Electromagnetism is one of them or EMFs, sitting more than normal, and then getting out of the chair and doing maybe intense exercises instead of gradual ones. We used to walk all day long or garden.

One of the fascia’s roles is to absorb mechanical stress. One of the things I like to talk about with fascia is to give people an understanding of what it’s constantly doing for us. It’s engaging with the five kinetic energies of our planet, which might sound a little woo, but it’s extremely scientific. We’ve got mechanical energy. If you want to run, hike, or go for a walk, you need mechanical energy.

You need it to stand up. I’m standing right now so my feet are touching the ground. The ground is unmovable. Hopefully, the floor under me isn’t going to collapse. Which one of us, the floor or me, is going to absorb that energy? It’s me. My body is going to absorb not only my kinetic energy going into the floor, but the floor will give it back to me constantly. It’ll bounce back into my body.

What fascia is supposed to do for us if we are healthy is take that mechanical stress or energy coming into the body. Mechanical stress, you could think about it like me standing here or if I didn’t like you Hilda, and I decide I’m going to punch you. If you are ever struck, hit in a car accident, or fall, those are types of mechanical stress. What that means is it’s mechanical energy that’s causing an impact that could be harmful. Fascia is supposed to absorb that mechanical stress and distribute it through our entire body so that we don’t get injured at the place of impact.

There are four more kinetic energies on the planet. What are those?

Let’s circle back around to those because I want to answer your question about plantar fasciitis and pain. If you can’t absorb mechanical stress, you’re going to feel stressed, a.k.a. pain, or potentially have damage occur in the area of impact. You are going to feel it in your feet if your body can’t absorb mechanical stress and you’re on your feet a lot. The solution is you’re not suffering from a lack of focus or cortisone injections, shoe inserts, or things like that.

That’s what I was thinking. It’s orthotic support. None of that stuff is what we’re missing.

No, we’re not. We’re missing water. Water is the key to fascia’s ability to absorb mechanical stress. The visual I love to give people is if you imagine throwing a rock in a pond. It’s going to hit the water. There’s an initial impact, but then it’ll form these ripples or these waves that travel all the way from the center of where it hit to the edges. They get gradually more subtle and gentle. That’s how our body would distribute mechanical stress in the same way.

It’s the water that distributes mechanical stress. If your tissue or your fascia has become dehydrated and brittle, you could think about it like throwing a rock in a mud puddle. It’s going to go splat and it’s going to cause a hole. There’ll be an indentation. It’ll cause damage to the mud because there’s not enough water there to distribute the mechanical stress. If you think about it, water is the most indestructible element on this planet. You can’t damage it.

If your fascia has become dehydrated and brittle, you could think about it like throwing a rock in a mud puddle.

I hadn’t thought about it before, but it rolls with the punches literally.

Yes, it’ll turn into steam and then evaporate, but then it’ll eventually come back down. It’ll move somewhere else. If you disturb it, it’ll go flush down the drain. It’ll freeze and then unfreeze, but you can’t destroy it. You can’t get rid of it. You can only move it and transform it. The other kinetic energy is light. We are photosynthesis machines. We photosynthesize. Also, magnetism or electromagnetism and then sound vibration, which is probably the least understood. We don’t talk about it very much. Also, thermal energy. It’s the heat and cold.

Is the fascia responsible for managing those energies in the body?

Yes. This is my personal opinion. I believe that there are physical-spiritual laws underpinning reality and we can know them. The same laws that apply to a tree apply to us, but maybe different rules apply to us in addition to trees because we’re not trees. These five kinetic energies behave very much the same way in us as in nature. It’s like that visual I gave you of throwing a rock in a pond.

Water behaves very much the same in us as it does in the planet. We have rivers. We have lakes. We have estuaries and then it leaves our body flowing into the ocean. These other kinetic energies are also coming in and leaving the bodies. We absorb them. We can transmit them, which means to communicate them, and then we can transfer them and then transform them. Those are the options and they’re happening whether we want them to or not.

You know how we’re always talking about people who have good vibes? You feel it. It’s an energy. It’s like, “I feel you,” or the people who have bad vibes. It’s an energy and we’re giving it off. That’s a transmission. I believe that it’s happening largely through that fascial system, which scientists are starting to explore a bit now, although it’s still pretty fringe. They’re looking at it like a giant sensing organ.

We can sense our environment with it. I think it’s through the fascia that we sense. You’re walking down the street and the hair’s on the back of your neck stand up. You look behind you and you get a bad vibe. You then get that intuition or instinct to walk a little faster. Neuroscience can’t explain it. Nervous system science can’t explain that. Something else is transmitting or receiving a transmission and we intercept it consciously.

I’ve heard you refer to the fascia as something of a knowledge field and I’ve heard other people talk about it being the place where the soul resides. I’m trying to wrap my mind around these concepts. If I’m hearing you correctly, what you’re saying is there is something not physical, but maybe spiritual and emotional and something that can’t be quantifiable by scientists related to the fascial tissue in our bodies.

Some of it’s quantifiable. Some of it is visually apparent. Some of it we can look at in living bodies if we cut them open and in cadavers but I’ve heard Zach Bush used the term the knowledge field. I like using that because to me it makes sense that there’s knowledge getting transmitted all the time right out there. The trees have knowledge I don’t have, but maybe I could know what the trees know.

Coming up. Elisha points out the importance of bio-individuality and why fascial release, as most of us understand it, may not work the same on every single person.

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Exercises For Fascia Health

I was about to ask you for some simple exercises that we could do to keep our fascia supple, young, and springy. I’ve heard of skipping, for example, but that’s not the only tactic to take with this tissue, is it?

No. I would encourage everybody when thinking about our bodies, pain, and health issues, I’m on a mission to share a couple of messages primarily. I call myself a pain advocate, but I believe we need to start treating individuals instead of symptoms and labels because one person might come to me with lower back pain that’s on the right side and it’s an 8 out of 10. Someone else might come to me with right-sided lower back pain, that’s an 8 out of 10 but they need completely different things to resolve it.

If I start thinking like, “This amazing thing I found that works for me. Everybody should do it. It’s going to work in exactly the same way,” we’ll miss the mark. We won’t quite get it. This is why people end up feeling stuck because a lot of the time these things do work. People try fascia release and they get out of pain and then they think everyone should do it, but then there are the people who don’t get the result or people who try the Wim Hof Method or ice baths.

Maybe it makes their autoimmune condition worse, but they don’t know why and they feel like, “There’s all these people with these amazing testimonials. Why am I the one who’s not getting a result?” I love to use practices that give us the data we need first about our body. We were talking about these five kinetic energies. You can measure them through fascia release, but you could also do it with cold plunging. Instead of doing a cold plunge or a cold shower, simply to get the health benefits you’ve been told are possible. I recommend that people first do it to learn about themselves. Let me give you a concrete example of why this is important. Hilda, do you have anything that scares you?

Yes, I would say so. Even though I like to be bold and unafraid, some things scare me now and then.

Can you name one if you don’t mind sharing?

I live in a city and I increasingly encounter mentally unwell people and it’s threatening.

Have you noticed anything in your body when you’re in an experience where you’re witnessing that or you don’t feel safe?

Absolutely. I know what my body and mind do. My mind thinks about how I can take them down if I need to. It’s self-defense, but I think of how I could kick them or do different things. I’m like, “That doesn’t seem very loving and friendly.” I go around most of my life wanting to be shine, light, and love but in these moments, I’m at the ready.

Do you notice anything with heat? Do you get hot? Do you get cold?

I think I get hot.

What you described is your fear triggers a fight and you need heat to fight. Your muscles need blood if you’re going to go into action. I’m wondering if you would agree with me that you could put somebody else in that scenario, maybe me, and they would get cold and they would go into freeze mode maybe.

I could picture that.

Understanding how as unique individuals we react to certain stimuli such as something that scares us or fascia release, a cold plunge, or the sauna is important because some people don’t need heat. They need something else, and other people need heat because maybe they go so into freeze all the time. I’m a big fan of, “Let’s do some investigating first to see what you as an individual need instead of thinking, ‘This fascia release thing is going to be what heals you or helps you,’” because some people might end up in worse pain. Some people might not get out of pain at all.

I often recommend that people not do what they see people doing on social media or the top podcasters are doing just because they’re doing it. I will speak from a woman’s point of view. Often these are men. They’re at a different age and stage. They’re probably from a different ethnic background. I’m me and they’re them. If I replicated let’s say Andrew Huberman’s diet, it wouldn’t necessarily work for me because I’m a completely different person. I think this is along the lines of what you’re saying about our relationship to the fascia and what’s needed.

I’m taking it a step further, which is, “Yes, we’re all different and we can come up with very strategic processes to know what we need,” instead of, “I don’t know. Let me experiment for 5 to 10 years and not know what I’m doing.” That’s what I love. I’m a scientist. I’m not trained. I believe everyone can be a scientist. I don’t necessarily think that the science being conducted in our institutions is necessarily that scientific.

We’re all different, and we can come up with very strategic processes to know what we need instead of just experimenting and not knowing what we’re doing.

Are you the one who coined the phrase, citizen scientist?

I don’t think I coined it, but I use it.

Elisha’s Personal Experience

I like that a lot. Let’s go back to some of your own learning experiences on your own body and fascia. Tell me about your own healing experience. I think it was in 2011 or so. What happened?

To tell you what happened that summer, we’ll have to rewind a little bit further. It is a long story but I’ll make it short for this episode. The short story is I went through some pretty traumatic things as a child and a teenager. I ended up not feeling emotions from age 10 to 24. I didn’t realize it until about age eighteen when a boyfriend broke up with me because he said, “I can’t feel you. You’re very unemotional. You don’t feel anything.”

He was crying breaking up with me and I was like, “It’s fine. It doesn’t matter.” He was like, “See? You don’t feel anything.” That was my wake-up call. I’m like, “He’s right. I don’t know why I’m not feeling anything,” but what I was feeling was intense, debilitating, daily chronic pain. I had gut pain that started when I was fourteen. It was bad and made me want to be very antisocial and stay home. I had stomach soft tissue pain pretty much head to toe.

I don’t go to doctors though, and I grew up not going to doctors. I’ve never gotten a diagnosis and I don’t believe in them anyway. If I had gone, I probably would’ve been diagnosed with something like fibromyalgia or myofascial pain syndrome and I’ve been given some drugs or whatever to manage it, but I had chronic daily pain. I had this knee pain that started when I was seventeen that eventually stopped me from running and then stopped me from hiking. That was another big wake-up call because I love those things more than anything. I love being outside. I live in Colorado these days.

In 2008, I was in massage school and one of my instructors introduced us to this method of fascial stretching that involves stepping on people. He said, “Who here wants to be stepped on?” My hand shot in the air faster than I could even think. I put my calf up on the chair and he stepped on my calf. The moment his weight sunk into my calf, I had this knowing that came over me, “I’m going to be okay. I’m going to hike and run again. I’m going to feel at peace in my body. I’m going to feel free. I’m going to heal.”

It’s only in hindsight that I can even tell you why I knew that at the time, but it’s related to what I shared about not feeling anything for so long. I started feeling again when I was 24. I started journaling. That was the most helpful thing for me because I tried talk therapy and it didn’t work for me. There are no judgments. I know some people benefit. It didn’t do anything for me. I tried a whole bunch of other things, every diet you could imagine, and not diet to lose weight, but elimination diets and gallbladder flushes, like drinking olive oil. I tried it to try to heal my gut.

None of that worked but then this knowing came over me and I’m like, “There’s something about this fascia thing. It’s going to heal me. It’s the key to my freedom.” I would love to tell you that it was an overnight success, but that’s not true. I tried to enroll my instructor, the founder of that modality, Richard Rossiter. I don’t mind sharing. I’m grateful I had this whole experience. I learned this modality called Rossiter. It’s a pin-and-stretch method initially.

No one could help me run and hike again. They couldn’t tell me why I was in pain, which was frustrating. The reason I’m sharing this is I think that this set me up to help people in a way that I wasn’t able to get help. I wanted to give people what I never got and I wanted answers first. I wanted answers more than anything. I figured, “If you can’t tell me why I am in pain, how can you help me?” Even though they were working with this fascia stuff, they didn’t know a whole lot about pain. I set out to learn everything I could about pain.

In 2011, I moved to Colorado with my best friend Jess. I grew up with her. We’d known each other since about seventh grade. We reconnected through Facebook in 2007, 2008, or something. We hadn’t seen each other in a long time but we decided to move to Colorado together. We moved into this mountain house and there was a trail right outside my door that went to the top of Mount Sanitas. I think you’ve maybe hiked that. Have you hiked it?

It sounds familiar. Yes.

I think you have. I think I’ve seen it on your Instagram. I was like, “There’s no way I can live here and not hike and run.” I asked Jess, “Would you learn to step on me and help me run and hike again?” She said, “Sure, that sounds fun.” Two weeks later, I was hiking and running again. That sounds like an overnight success story and again, it isn’t. It was two and a half years of experimentation and then this one very important thing happened.

I would love this to be one takeaway for your audience about fascia because I think there are some misconceptions out there about it. I’ve had so much experience working directly with this tissue that I can share some examples of what I’m about to say. What happened between 2008 and 2011 that I believe allowed me to help me better than my teachers is I accidentally invented, although I don’t know that I invented anything, I accidentally discovered what I would lovingly refer to these days as the clunk.

If you ever do fascia release of any kind, that’s the way I teach it anyway. It’s a compression and shearing-based fascia release method. We are hunting out adhesions. These are balls of tissue that are stuck in knots. What I learned initially was a pin and stretch method where you would step on people, pin the tissue to the floor, and then coach people through movement to stretch fascia like Taffy. I was hired straight out of massage school by a chiropractor who I did a demo on of stepping on her. It got rid of her hip pain that had been nagging her for a year and 20 minutes. She forbade me from stepping on people.

Why? That doesn’t make sense. It helped her and she didn’t want you to use it.

She had an insurance-based business in Georgia. This is Georgia in the South. I was seeing people in chronic pain every week. I worked there for a year. I saw the same people every week for a year. They were on insurance seeing me. She had an insurance-based business and unfortunately, I think that’s true with a lot of practitioners these days. They don’t necessarily want people getting better because if they do, they don’t get that paycheck.

I knew I could help people with this other thing so I started doing table Rossiter using my forearm to pin tissue. They’d be fully clothed and then I’d coached them through some movement. I discovered the clunk. I was like, “Something thunked under my arm.” I had asked them like, “You felt that, right?” They’re like, “Yeah, that hurts a lot,” but their pain went away like that.

I’ll never forget the first client this happened with. She was 72. She had debilitating hip pain and she’d been coming every week for a while. I was like, “Can I try something on you? It’s probably going to hurt a lot, but I think it’ll help you.” She was like, “I’ll try anything.” She let me try this on her. I sunk my forearm into her IT band. I coached her through some leg movements. We got the clunk, we started shearing it, and within three minutes, she was out of pain and she didn’t need to come back.

Were you nervous? Were you like, “This lady’s over 70? I’m going to break something on her.”

No, I’ve never had that. I think that’s a good question. A lot of people will ask that, and a lot of people are afraid to hurt people but I’ve never been afraid to hurt people with this for some reason. I have this knowing that we are not as fragile as we think we are. I didn’t learn this until much later. This is not something I knew back. This would’ve been 2010. Fascia is as strong as steel. It can withstand up to 2,000 pounds of mechanical force without deforming if it’s healthy.

We are not as fragile as we think we are.

It would take a lot to truly damage someone and we’re also really good at protecting ourselves. We have that fight or flight instinct where we’ll brace against it if it doesn’t feel right to us. When I’m working with people, I’m always paying attention to that and working with it because that’s a nervous system reaction. I call the nervous system the gatekeeper to the world of fascia because one thing about fascia is that it won’t change just because we want it to. If you think about it, that’s how life is. You don’t get to wave a magic wand and rub a genie bottle and have everything you want.

Misconceptions About Fascia

There’s going to be some work involved and it may be painful as you were suggesting. I want to go back to something you said. There are many common misconceptions about fascia. Can you clear a few up? We’re running a little bit out of time, Elisha, but this is fascinating or should I say fascianating? Tell us some common misconceptions that people have related to fascia.

Fascia has become so popular right now. Maybe you’ve seen this, but fascia fitness methods are coming out. People are claiming that Yin yoga can help you have healthy fascia. If you eat these kinds of foods, it’s going to feed your fascia. Those are all what I would call outside-in approaches where we project something we’ve heard or learned in a book or on a YouTube video onto the body and we think it’s going to do something specific.

If you think with reality, this is a saying I like to say, we all know it’s not true. You can feed someone the same food and they’re going to react differently. Some people like it. Some people don’t like it. Some people’s guts are okay with it. Some people aren’t and it’s for all kinds of different reasons. The same thing is true with fascia. We have this misconception that you can release it and it’ll be released. That’s not true.

When I say, release it, or that you could get on a foam roller and it should do you good, but it might not, or that if you come to see me because I’m going to step on you, you’ll get out of pain. That’s not necessarily true. The other major one has to do with what I was sharing about compression and shearing. If you pin and stretch fascia or these Yin yogis, I live in Boulder, Colorado and there are tons of yogis here. I have stepped on a lot of them and they have the most adhesed fascia of anyone I’ve ever worked with.

You would think it would be the opposite.

Here’s the thing. Fascia will withstand over-stretching. It’ll resist it by forming knots. If we’re constantly doing the splits and doing these yoga poses where we’re trying to increase flexibility, we may cause our fascia to form adhesions in the process. That’s a big misconception. Compression and shearing is what creates water. I’m pretty sure you’ve heard of Gerald Pollack.

I’ve interviewed him.

I want to get him on my podcast. Compression and shearing of water molecules create structured water. This is what happens when we compress and shear, fascia is supposed to be mostly water. When we compress and shear the fascia, we create structured water in the body. That has a profoundly healing effect on us.

It creates that water battery where it’s going to move our blood and our lymph fluids faster. It’s going to usher toxins out. We’re going to have good blood circulation. I’m a huge fan of compression and shearing over other forms to get in there into those knotty areas, into the brittle tissues, and rehydrate them. Some of those other methods aren’t going to do that.

I almost feel like I’m a little bit more confused here toward the end than I was at the beginning. You’ve suggested that while some people would say that stretching is a good idea for your fascia, it leads to adhesion if you do too much of it. If you do too little movement, if you’re sitting a lot or not hydrated, it can lead to some tightening up of the fascia.

Final Tips

You’ve also said that one case may need one kind of treatment and the other might need another even if the cases seem to be identical or present identical symptoms. Is there anything across the board that you would recommend? We’re getting toward the end of the show and I, as much as the audience, want to know, are there simple things we can do to keep our fascia hydrated, supple, and springy?

I wish I had a very easy prescription for you, but I don’t. I have one thing I’m going to point to that has been consistent. I’ve been doing this since 2008. It’s been consistent since that time, which is that people who are in integrity with themselves have the healthiest fascia. I’ve had a front-row seat to people with chronic pain and trauma. Many of these people are in the wrong marriage. They tell me that they want to be out of their marriage, but they’re too scared to leave their partner or talk to them.

Some people hate their job and they’re too afraid to quit. They tell me these things as we’re working together. The people who are clearly in the right relationship, love their lives, they’re moving their bodies, they have the family life they want, and they have the friends they want. They have the healthiest fascia and they get out of pain fast.

This is one reason why here on the show we focus on food farming and the healing arts. The fascia falls into the latter category, but there are so many components to well-being beyond what the eye can see or even what the body can feel.

Think about it related to those kinetic energies because we’re transmitting that vibration all the time. If you’re not in integrity with yourself, you’re literally in resistance or internal conflict, and that creates tension. That’ll cause tension in your fascia and your fascia will then reflect that.

If you’re not in integrity with yourself, you’re literally in resistance or in internal conflict, which creates tension. This will cause tension in your fascia, and your fascia will then reflect that.

This has been amazing. I’m so thankful that you came on to enlighten us a little bit about this little-understood tissue. We have a lot more to explore maybe in a future episode. In the meantime, I want to pose to you the question I love to pose at the end. If the audience could do one thing to improve their health, maybe it would be related to fascia, it might not be though, what is one thing you would recommend that they do?

It has to be related to the last thing I said. Look within and examine whether you are living the life you want. If you’re in integrity with yourself or if you keep the promises you make to yourself, I think that the best single thing we could do for ourselves is to make every choice we make every day, who we’re with, who our friends are, and how we spend our time that it’s intentional and it’s in integrity with what our soul and spirit are telling us we should be doing.

That sounds like a wonderful way to live and a good question to pose to ourselves. Thank you so much for your time. It’s been a wonderful conversation, Elisha.

Hilda, thank you so much. I’ll come back anytime if you want.

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Our guest today was Elisha Celeste. Visit her website to learn more. You can find me on my Holistic Hilda website. Now, for a recent review from Apple Podcasts. Friendly Lizard said this. “My Favorite Podcast. This is my favorite podcast. I appreciate the program. It has meant a lot to the health of my family and our seventeen-month-old through his life so far.”

Friendly Lizard, thank you so much for your friendly review. We appreciate you. If you would also like to rate and review the show, go to Apple Podcasts, click on the ratings and reviews, give us a bunch of stars, and tell us what the show means to you. Thank you so much for tuning in, my friend. Stay well and remember to keep your feet on the ground and your face to the sun.

About Elisha Celeste

Elisha Celeste is a self proclaimed “pain advocate” on a mission to bring scientific rigor to the healing arts while honoring the spiritual nature of reality. After discovering the world of fascia in 2008, she knew it would be the key to her own healing and freedom.